


Like Peas and Carrots

by Ellerigby13



Series: Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Childhood Friends, F/M, Forrest Gump Fusion, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pining, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sharing a Bed, Singing, Slut Shaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25554751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellerigby13/pseuds/Ellerigby13
Summary: When they were kids, Steve, Bucky, and Darcy had been inseparable.  Even after they've grown up, with Bucky shipping off to Vietnam, Steve in art school, and Darcy in her swanky New England university, Bucky still kind of hopes that they fit together like peas and carrots.AU based on that scene from Forrest Gump.
Relationships: Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Darcy Lewis, James "Bucky" Barnes/Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851811
Comments: 17
Kudos: 119
Collections: Darcy Lewis Bingo





	Like Peas and Carrots

**Author's Note:**

> Bingo fill for the Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 square: R5 - Friends to Lovers.  
> And for those of you interested in my salt, the slut shaming asshole's name is Michael, as he is physically based on someone I wasted way too much time on in college.

_ I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it’s both. - Forrest Gump _

* * *

Bucky filed into an empty seat in the back of the theater, shuffling his body between the thick of the crowd under the dim lights overhead. There was something suddenly very tight about his uniform, something that made his heart ram wildly against his ribcage and made the back of his throat very, very dry. He tried to swallow once before the theater went almost completely dark, save for the one spotlight that illuminated a single chair in the center of the stage.

“Hey,” someone whispered from the blackness beside him - Bucky would’ve jumped if he hadn’t recognized Steve’s small frame falling into the next seat, five minutes late.

“Jesus, punk, almost gave me a heart attack.”

Steve’s skinny fingers slid between Bucky’s and squeezed. “Shut up, will ya? Show’s about to start.”

He was right. The crowd lulled to a tense hush, the patrons of the theater, with maybe ten, fifteen women between them, bating their breath in anticipation of the small figure who was about to take the stage. From this far back, she was even smaller - a faint peach outline of naked curves behind the deep chestnut guitar she held to her chest. As she lowered onto the chair in center stage, dark waves of hair cascading over the body of the instrument, a few men might have whistled - if Bucky or Steve could listen to anything that wasn’t her high, saccharine voice.

When Bucky closed his eyes, he was in Darcy’s apartment in Brooklyn again, smelling her pa’s delicious cooking, watching her dab at Steve’s busted nose while she sang. Didn’t matter what it was, Polish lullabies from her father’s home or the latest Ella Fitzgerald, her voice wrapped around the music like butterscotch, soft and warm and sugary. It reminded him of summertime, sunshine, salty sweat skin.

“Like you remember?” Steve breathed, his back straight while he watched Darcy straight ahead, his hand squeezing tight on Bucky’s. Bucky wanted desperately to lean his head on Steve’s shoulder, but settled for sinking into the back of his seat and letting his tricep brush against his best friend.

“Yeah. Just like it.”

They were barely close enough to recognize the striking red lipstick she’d swabbed on, far enough that her dark, hooded eyes blurred into the porcelain planes of her cheeks as she plucked tenderly at the guitar. This was a song that she’d hummed through the entirety of high school, the lyrics of which she had doodled idly into the corners of her notebook in class, had begged Steve to sketch a little figure of her that she’d dreamed up as a vinyl cover. She had the subtlest little sway almost into her guitar, as if it were an extended part of her side. Damn his heart, Bucky thought, the way that it swelled.

If the crowd had been restless when she first appeared, it was nearly bone still now. Tension hung heavy in the air, the clear anticipation in their silence for her voice, a siren’s lullaby, to waft over the audience until every last member had gone jelly-brained, every pair of hands clutching its owners knees except for the two in the back, whose hands had held each other’s many times before and would hold each other’s many times to come.

For the hundredth time, Bucky and Steve watched as everyone else realized their senses for the first time and fell in love with Darcy, too.

The men in front of them looked like dogs who’d just shaken the water out of their ears, punch drunk, their pupils blown as they took in the sound and the beauty of their girl.

When the show was over, they found Darcy outside, wearing a silk top tied at the middle of her waist, her hair piled messily on her head. Some clean-cut prep from nearby attempted to lean casually against the wall beside her, babbling on about God knows what. But when she saw her boys, who’d painstakingly unlaced their hands when the lights went up, her whole face glowed.

“You  _ made _ it!” Darcy threw an arm around each of their shoulders, and for a second, Bucky held them both - his whole world - smelling sweetly of incense and hairspray and the charcoal Steve couldn’t shake from his clothes.

“Caught me on furlough,” Bucky explained as she let go, beaming, “thought I’d give the old collegiate hippie lifestyle a look.”

Darcy socked him gently in the arm. “You look nice in uniform. All...clean cut and sharp.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “You don’t gotta be nice, Darce, his ugly mug ain’t changed one bit.”

She pulled on Steve quickly enough to press a kiss to his cheek, then looped an arm through each of theirs, chauffeuring them away from the building and toward the parking lot. “I’ve missed you both somethin’ awful. You come in together? How long you two stayin’ for?”

Bucky stole a quick glance at Steve - she was the same Darcy they remembered, alright. Fine and sweet and big-hearted and spitfire. “I’m only here a couple days - I’m visitin’ Ma and Becca in Brooklyn before we ship out.”

Steve shrugged, running a hand back through his hair. “Semester’s over at School of the Arts. I can stick around till you kick me out.”

She brightened visibly at this, pulling her arm out of Steve’s to fish through her pocket for the keys to the beat up orange Chevy parked in the middle of the lot. There was no way in hell all three of them would fit comfortably in the cab. “You can stay as long as you want, handsome. Or at least until they kick  _ us _ out for the summer.”

One very cramped car ride later, they arrived at the east end of Darcy’s tree-dotted campus, each pathway illuminated by high rising lampposts. The moment they got out of the car, Darcy had squeezed in between them again, marching Steve and Bucky toward the bench in front of a large brick building.

“I need a cigarette,” she announced softly, plopping down in the middle of the wood and digging through her purse for the small silver tin that housed her Marlboros. She scooted to one end, letting Bucky fall into the middle and Steve on the opposite side so that when she blew smoke it wouldn’t bother him.

“This place is gorgeous, doll,” Bucky said, gazing into the clear galaxies above them and the treeline that cut against the bottom of it like a border in a postcard. “Ain’t seen nothin’ like this anywhere near Lehigh.”

“Or Brooklyn,” Steve sighed.

Darcy crossed her legs under her, her knee bumping innocently against Bucky’s. “Wish I got to spend more time under the naked sky. Would do it, if I could pay for school in starlight.”

She cradled the lit cigarette between her index and middle fingers, then lifted her eyes cautiously to Bucky, and then Steve, and his insides were struck for a moment with a frozen anticipation - for what, he didn’t quite know.

And then a few sets of footsteps not far off broke the tension in the air, followed by four laughing, raucous voices, and the couples they belonged to. One of them, a tall, lanky blond in the preppiest blue sweater Bucky had ever seen, glanced quickly at the three of them on their bench.

“Hey, Darcy,” he called, voice low and confident as it wrapped around her name. He didn’t wait for a response before he and his group proceeded onward, the girl on his arm not bothering to hide her snickering when they left.

When Bucky looked back into her face, Darcy had tilted her chin down, her cheeks a dull pink in the fading moonlight. She slid the end of her cigarette back into her mouth and took a long, deep inhale.

“Hey,” Steve said soothingly, leaning across to rest his hand on hers. “What’s all that about? Who’s that jerk?”

“Nobody.” She choked on the word and swiped at her nose, pressing her lips into a thin smile as she crushed the cigarette butt under her heel. “Just some asshole.”

Bucky traded a concerned glance with Steve, but didn’t push it. Darcy stood from her place, smiling through a glaze, and extended a hand to each of them. “C’mon,” she said quietly, “my roommate’s staying at her boyfriend’s.”

The small, dark dorm room was indeed empty on one side, save for the tall, glistening bottle that sat on its desk with a scrap of paper stuck to it with tape. Darcy plucked up the note once she’d locked the door behind her. 

“Is that a pear?” Steve said, bending his knees to meet the bottle at eye level.

“Pear brandy,” Darcy read off the note, the hints of a smile tugging on her lips. “Wanda left it for me. Big thing where she’s from, I guess. Let me get us some glasses.”

Bucky settled into the empty chair at the desk on the opposite side, trying his best not to follow Darcy’s elegant gait with his eyes, nor the sloping curve of her waist as she stood on tiptoe to reach for the tinkling glasses in a cabinet above the dorm sink. When she poured the brandy, her tongue peeking into the corner of her lip, the pear bobbing against the neck of the bottle, he had to avert his eyes, finding Steve in a similar state. 

“To old friends,” she said, lifting her glass.  _ Friends,  _ echoed in his head, as he longed so desperately to hold the pair of them, to bring them both to his chest and kiss them silly. 

“To old friends.”

The stuff only burned a little on the way down, swallowed up by the sweetness of the fruit on his tongue. “Where’d you say she was from?”

“Sokovia.” The word slid easily from Darcy’s lips with an air of mystery. “Off some Russian border or another. She and her folks came in after the war. She lost her brother in it.”

“Shit,” Steve breathed, gazing down into his glass. “That’s hard.”

Darcy hummed her agreement, finally settling into the edge of her bed beside Steve and letting the thick shoes dangling off her feet fall to the floor. “She’s wonderful, though. The only real friend I’ve got around here.”

There was a sadness to her voice that Bucky could only place in the times he’d heard it on her before, every time her heart had been broken - and just a few moments ago in the courtyard. 

“Doll, what happened? With that jackass back there?”

“Nothing,” she insisted, before withering under both of their stares, and sighed. “He’s an idiot. I thought I liked him, thought he wanted to take me on a date, and when he came to pick me up, he started gettin’ fresh. I told him to kick rocks, so he turned around and told everyone I…”. Darcy’s teeth bared down on the plush of her lower lip. She couldn’t look at either of them then. “He got everybody thinkin’ I was this  _ deviant _ , trying to do all these wild things with him and a whole circus of other fellas. And, I dunno, maybe because somebody found out I work at the theater, everybody started believin’ him. Almost got me kicked outta school.”

Bucky felt his face go hot with anger, and he knew the only thing stopping Steve from jumping to his feet and finding the bastard was Darcy’s glass in his hand.

Rumors were nasty, Bucky knew, but Darcy had been subject to them since they were kids, seeing as she’d spent most of her time with the two of them, dirtying her dresses, smearing her pants with mud. They’d done little more back in Brooklyn than hurt her feelings for a while, before she’d hopped right up with her gap-toothed smile and declared that she’d kill ‘em all with kindness. He’d never thought about how they might affect her as an adult. 

“I’m sorry,” he forced himself to say, instead of demanding the punk’s name and address. “I’m sorry he did that, doll.”

“It’s fine.” She clearly did not look as if it was fine. “I’m graduating in a few weeks anyhow. Leavin’ that old collegiate hippie lifestyle behind me.”

“Then what?” Steve spoke up, his eyes still fixed on the bottom of his glass. “You comin’ back to Brooklyn?”

“I don’t think so.” She poured herself another glass and loosed the bun from the top of her head with one sweeping motion, so that her hair came tumbling down once more in a luscious dark curtain over her shoulders. “I think...I’m gonna move to San Francisco and sing every song I know in every bar I can find until I die of exhaustion.”

Bucky smiled. “And will there be a seat for us at every bar in San Francisco?”

Darcy got her bare feet beneath her, and bent down next to Bucky to place a vinyl on her record player with her fingertips, music pouring out of the needle the moment it touched down. “You better believe it, Bucky Barnes.”

If there was a path she didn’t cut through the cramped quarters of her dorm room, Bucky and Steve were hard pressed to find it. At one point she’d led the three of them to dance on top of Wanda’s bed, their feet digging into her stripped mattress as Billie Holiday crooned over Steve and Bucky clumsily twirling her between them. Darcy’s cheeks flushed pink when she laughed - that sound, combined with the brandy, filled Bucky’s insides with warmth. 

She poured them another drink as the needle scratched over the snowy sound of the record’s end. Steve had gone glassy eyed, but his hands were steady as he drank deep.

“No, no, no,” Steve protested slowly, shaking his head, when Darcy pulled on his arm to join her with another record. “I’m  _ definitely _ gonna step on your toes like this, Darce.”

“I don’t  _ care _ ,” she whined, but let go anyhow, leaning into her pillow. “I’m so happy you’re here. Both of you. I was so worried when we…”

“What?” Bucky asked, only when she’d trailed off, very aware of her hand still on Steve’s slender arm. “When we what?”

“I was worried you’d forget about me.” She swallowed the last gulp in her glass before setting it down on her desk. “You guys have always had each other. And I know I...it’s not the same with me, what you’ve got is, y’know, special. And I was worried that...when you shipped off and you went to art school and I came out here…” She shrugged, pursing her soft red lips. “...that you’d be ready to clean your hands of me.”

Before Bucky could even open his mouth to protest, Steve had thrust both hands into Darcy’s hair and pulled her face to meet his, kissing her long and hard on the lips.

Darcy seemed to freeze for a moment, her blue eyes wide with shock as Steve cradled her by the back of the neck, but then she was kissing him back, lids falling shut as she brought a cautious hand to thread it through Steve’s soft golden locks.

Steve was the one to break the kiss first, the expression on his face glazed with the drunkenness that comes with being in love. He lolled his head to the side to meet Bucky’s eye. “You think we could ever forget about you, Darce?  _ Never _ .”

“Not on your life, kiddo,” Bucky added, as Darcy reached for him, too, slipping her hand into his to pull him to her other side. She kissed him hard, tasting better than he ever could have dreamed, the menthol in her smoke blending with the sweet wet glaze of pear brandy on her tongue. When she pulled away, one hand on the collar of his shirt and the other pressed to the center of Steve’s chest, she rested her forehead to Bucky’s, breathing hard.

“I’m dizzy,” she whispered, a dazed smile on her lips, her eyes closed.

Steve brushed her hair away from her neck, running a thumb over the slope of her jaw. “Maybe you should get some sleep.”

As if on cue, a catlike yawn stretched across her soft and beautiful features. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve had a really long fucking day.”

Steve and Bucky both chuckled at this. And then they realized that they were in a college dorm, where the only beds in sight were a couple of twins, definitely not made for sleeping more than one person let alone Bucky’s wide-shouldered frame.

“I’ll take the floor,” Bucky volunteered, but Darcy’s fingers dug into his skin through his uniform.

“We can squeeze in,” she promised.

The next morning, Bucky woke with his back pressed to the wall, Darcy’s shoulder blades fused to his chest, and Steve’s feet, still somehow freezing cold, tangled with his at the end of the bed. He smiled, resting one hand on Darcy’s waist and the other on the small of Steve’s back, and closed his eyes again, breathing in the people he loved and the way they fit together.


End file.
